


The Frozen Frog

by myrishswamp



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-22
Updated: 2015-02-22
Packaged: 2018-03-14 12:41:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3410996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrishswamp/pseuds/myrishswamp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A quick story, following on a bit from this one: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1878786</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Frozen Frog

**Author's Note:**

> A quick story, following on a bit from this one: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1878786

Next to where Jorelle was sitting, a drop of water separated itself from the ice and slid off the frog’s fat purple leg. Laconic, she watched it fall into the puddle by her feet. 

Meera was standing about a foot from the bank, hacking chunks of ice out of the frozen river with her frogspear. After pulling them out she would hold them up to inspect their contents, then toss them over to melt by Jorelle’s fire. 

The frog had been frozen into one of them. The ice around it was melting fast now, caving itself away from the frog. Just below, a fish had been sliced clean through its middle, its translucent flesh and the dotted ends of blood vessels were perfectly defined at the edge of the block. Only its fin, half trapped in an air bubble, had been caught messily by the frogspear. Silver skin strewn ragged against the ice. 

She jabbed her stick at the fire, whipping up the unwilling flames. The firelight bounced off the frog’s eyes and gave it the illusion of something still living. She eyed it up. Purple, surely a sign that eating it could not be worth the pain it would cause them, but Meera knew the forest’s fauna better than she did. If Meera said so, the frog would be harmless. 

And then, as she leaned down, she thought she saw its upper left leg twitch. Then its upper right. There was no doubt about it, the frog was moving, raising itself by its legs and starting to peel the skin of its underside from the surface of the block. Jorelle fumbled for her dagger and drove it through the frog’s back, pinning it to the ice. For a few seconds its twitching continued, but it was no longer purposeful. 

Meera called out, “You killed it.” She was walking towards her, the last of the ice in her hands. Her voice held no indication that anything unusual had happened. 

“It...What was that?” Jorelle asked.

Meera grinned and crouched down next to the dead frog. 

“Well,” she said, waving a hand outwards, “You know what happens when people freeze...” The hand was thickly gloved, but Jorelle had seen the blackened fingers underneath. “That doesn’t happen to this kind of frog, they can freeze themselves for the winter like they’re going to sleep, then in the spring the sun thaws them and they just... wake up again.”

Jorelle shuddered, she didn’t want to think about things that just woke up again, even if they were only frogs. Back at Bear Island her family had heard of what went on beyond the Wall, but only recently had they seen what her uncle’s letters had described. The shudder turned to a tremble, but Meera’s hands reached to her shoulders to calm it. 

Neither of them spoke as they walked back to the cave. It wasn’t uneasy. They had spent enough time together for their silences to be comfortable. Jorelle was carrying their haul, gathered up in Meera’s net. Meera was raking her frogspear along the branches above them, pulling snow down onto their heads.

It almost felt like a summer snowfall. 

She remembered summer snow. Snow with bottles of beer pushed in for chilling. Snow pressed into gashes got chasing through thorns after bears. Snow pressed into balls and thrown from bedroom windows. It was a while before she noticed that the snow had stopped falling. 

Meera’s arm had fallen to her side, her gaze fixed on nothing, adrift in an unconsciousness. That happened sometimes. Her eyes would seem to be pointing forwards, but if you really looked, you would find them drawn far back into her skull, watching things that only existed there. 

Meera had never told her what she’d seen beyond the wall. Jorelle didn’t know why she’d gone there, only that in trying to get back home, she had already lost a brother. After she had turned up at Winterfell, Jorelle had been asked by Lady Sansa to accompany her the rest of the way, to make sure that her journey suffered no more casualties. 

A quiver at the corner of Meera’s mouth told her what kind of unconsciousness this was. 

Nudging her with an elbow, Jorelle pointed to a raven perched on a nearby tree. “Look, it’s such a beautiful bird,” she said.

“Hmm,” Meera’s eyes didn’t move. 

She tried again. “What colour would you say it was?”

This time Meera looked, then she reached for Jorelle’s arm, whipped the bow off it and shot an arrow at the raven. It flew off, confused and squawking.

Jorelle snatched the bow back, “Gods, what are you doing? It could have been carrying a message.” 

Meera pinched her arm, teasing, and said, “It wasn’t, and I wasn’t trying to kill it, just scare it away.” She shrugged, “I don’t want it eating food we haven’t found yet.”

Birds were more or less the only other living things left in the forest, and they didn’t stay for long. Their silence grew colder after that. 

They were halfway back when Meera said, “You know we should have kept on the kingsroad.”

“Its not safe.” Jorelle didn’t want to talk about this again. 

“You need something to follow, or you get lost. I told you that. If we hadn’t found the cave-”

“We did,” Jorelle said, firmly, but Meera kept talking, her voice rising. 

“You know you haven’t travelled as much as I have, not in these conditions. 

“Aye, but how long’s it been since you were in the North? You have no idea how dangerous it is.” 

“Then I won’t help you!” Meera retorted, “And if we don’t die before we reach the Neck you can drown in the swamp like every other stupid outsider.” She ran off into the trees, leaving Jorelle to walk back to the cave alone. She would be back soon, sometimes being alone was what they both needed. 

Meera was wrong anyway, by now the swamps would be as firm as the ground they stood on. Still, she had been right about the kingsroad, it was dangerous, but if they could have kept in sight of it they wouldn’t have got lost. 

Jorelle had planned on navigating using the sun’s path, as her mother had taught her, but it had become hard to tell where the sun was rising, or if it rose at all. The only hint of daytime was a dim, directionless light which permeated the fog for a few hours each day. They used those hours to gather food, or wood, or to try to find a way onwards, but most of their time was spent huddled in the cave. 

She could see its opening ahead of her, a narrow slit in the rock. When she reached it, she pushed the net through, then squeezed in after. The cave was small, but that made it easier to keep warm inside. After dumping their haul she moved over to the corner where they kept the wood.

She viewed the pile grimly. Most of the logs were too wet to hold a flame, but she managed to gather together an armful that was only damp and carried it over to the centre of the cave. There she built a fire. It would be enough to last them until morning, and then... she could only hope that the rest dried fast. 

The dampness made thick smoke billow from the wood, but most of it was sucked out of the cave mouth and into the cold air outside. She positioned herself near the back of the cave, away from the stream. The smoke would at least make it easier for Meera to find the entrance. 

She gathered up the fur blankets lying on the floor and wrapped them around herself, then, closing her eyes, she rested her head against the wall. 

A thud on the floor of the cave woke her up. A rabbit had landed next to her, curled up against a cold which had frozen it to sleep. 

She rolled over to face the thrower. Whilst she had slept the fire had diminished, and it took her eyes a while to adjust to the darkness. Meera was on the other side of it, sitting with her legs folded underneath her and her hands pressed between her thighs. The remaining smoke was wisping in front of her.

Jorelle yawned, “If I wait too long to cook this one, is it going to start moving?”

Meera’s reply was embarrassed. “No, but we should cook it quickly anyway, before the fire goes.”

She hesitated there, until Jorelle patted the ground and she moved over to join her. For a while they sat with their lines of vision parallel, neither looking at the other. 

“Jory I’m sorry.”

“Once we find somewhere to move onto, we’ll start looking for the kingsroad.”

“I’m sorry.”

Pale hairs on Meera’s cheeks were illuminated in the firelight. Her eyes were tentative. She placed her hand lightly on Jorelle’s palm. All of the nerves in Jorelle’s body were detaching themselves and flooding to her fingers. She closed her own hand around it, then with the other pulled her blanket over Meera. They slept there by the dying fire, the half forgotten rabbit still lying in its embers. Within them the world turned slow and soft, a confirmation wrapped inside their hands. 

Jorelle woke up first. She moved over to the cave's mouth, outside were rows and rows of ravens, sitting silently in the trees. 

She whispered. “Look. Come outside. Meera.”

Meera slept lightly, soon she was pushing herself up on Jorelle’s shoulder to see out of the mouth of the cave. The sight seemed to enrage her. She ran out, picking up rocks and throwing them at the birds, and swiping her frogspear at the trees, but the ravens only flew to higher perches. She tried to follow them up the tree but was too short to reach the branches, so she clawed at its trunk until Jorelle grabbed her waist and pulled her back down. 

Bark and blood lay under her fingernails. “It was them.” She wrestled her head out of Jorelle’s arms and screamed at the birds. “They sent the dreams. They let him die.”

Back under the furs they lay very still, clutching each other. She thought of Dacey, and the secret anger she had held inside herself. The Freys had killed her sister, but the Starks had let her die. She never let it crawl to the surface.


End file.
